Big Ideas

The Long Runway [01:19]

The launch resulted in generating $3.45 million. So what contributed to that? Well, if you haven’t listened to the previous episode, go check that out. It’s all about the long runway we built leading up to our launch. I outline the entire philosophy behind how we sell. I specifically talked about the 2 initial phases of the launch process—The Connection & Awareness phases. This long runway works and it’s something that we swear by. People were ready to buy before we even made them an offer. You can check out that episode here.

Keep Moving Forward [03:51]

Our success didn’t come without challenges. Here are just a few…

The night before we were scheduled to go live I start getting all these emails from our JV partners, saying that they were getting a 502 error. Long story short, we couldn’t accept any opt-ins. The form wasn’t working properly. Turns out, this had nothing to do with us, but rather, it was a global problem that Infusionsoft was experiencing. Eventually we got that resolved just in the nick of time and stress levels slowly came back down!

Right in the midst of the launch we had an unsubscribe link directly in the middle of our email?! Typically these are located at the bottom of an email. But somehow, we made this mistake. And unfortunately anyone who didn’t read the full email and quickly clicked on the link, accidently got unsubscribed.

The tracking and reporting of our JV stats were completely out of whack. The opt-in percentages were lower than I’ve ever seen them, and I knew something just wasn’t right. It turns out, if an affiliate link is posted on Facebook, they will hit that link 4 or 5 times before it actually sends somebody to the actual destination. So one person could click once and it could show up in the stats as 4 or 5 clicks – which was completely throwing off all the opt-in stats. So that sucked!

We had an update to our server that caused a whole bunch of issues.

At the start of our webinar, for the first 30 minutes, there were a bunch of people who couldn’t get on. Eventually we recovered from that.

There were just all these technical hiccups. And what I would share about these challenges is this… You just have to keep moving forward. Despite all of the problems we faced, our entire team just kept going. When you’re in a high intense situation, that type of resiliency is super important.

The Power of Selling Through Stories [09:48]

I must have shared a gazillion stories of our Triber’s, of all levels, who had experienced success through our program. I love telling stories and shared them throughout our entire launch. I shared them in our case studies, on our webinars, in FB lives, in Q&A’s, when I was being interviewed, and so on and so forth. Stories speak to common objections. And when people hear the stories, they can relate and connect to the people featured in those stories. As a result, it opens their minds to what’s possible. It creates this belief. People think “Hey, if it’s possible for them, maybe it’s possible for me too?”

We even asked past Tribers to jump on our FB live discussions to share their experience and answer questions. There is no better way to sell than through stories!

The Results [13:00]

So what happened in terms of the results? We did $1M in the first 24 hours and then another million in the next 24 hours. Going into the third day, things slowed considerably, but we did about $400K in sales. And then on the final cart close day, we did about another million in sales. The grand total ended up being $3.45M.

Lessons Learned & What We’ll Do Differently Next Year [15:10]

Lesson 1: Communicate Dates to Our JV’s Way Earlier

This part shocked me, but 7 of our top 10 JV partners either didn’t participate or didn’t even land in the top 10. This was crazy to me. When I think of our top 10 JV’s from our multi-million dollar launch that happened in the previous year, how could none of them rank in the top 10? What prevented our JV’s from getting on board?

Turns out, it was mostly scheduling conflicts. The reality was, we were originally supposed to do this launch 4 months ago (November 2017). But a bunch of things ended up happening and we had to bump up the date. So timing wise, things didn’t work out with our typical JV partners.

This also tells me that there’s a huge area of opportunity. What if we had the JV’s from the first launch also participating in the next launch? That would end up being a monster launch! So one of the big lessons learned here, is to communicate the dates to our JV’s WAY in advance. Next year’s date has already been scheduled and locked in.

Lesson 2: Continue to Invest in Client Stories

The second lesson learned is to continue to double down and invest in our stories. We’ve already got a bunch of stories from people who took advantage of our free workshop and got incredible results and I can’t wait to share them.

Lesson 3: Prepare More in Advance

The third lesson for next year, is that we’re going to get things done way further in advance. It will alleviate a lot of pressure & stress, and it also creates more in-the-moment creative freedom. Our team is really great at coming up with creative ideas in the moment. For instance, when it came to our advertising, we came up with a number of ideas, off the cuff, that ended up producing tremendous results. So next year, I want more freedom to explore those creative ideas.

Memorable Quotes

“Stories speak to common objections.” – Stu McLaren

“Make your customers the stars of your marketing. When you do, great things are going to happen.” – Stu McLaren

Resources

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